"Wren" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... occasionally the plaintive note of a white-tufted tyrant-flycatcher (Myiobius albiceps) may be heard, concealed near the summit of the most lofty trees; and more rarely the loud strange cry of a black woodpecker, with a fine scarlet crest on its head. A little, dusky-coloured wren (Scytalopus Magellanicus) hops in a skulking manner among the entangled mass of the fallen and decaying trunks. But the creeper (Oxyurus tupinieri) is the commonest bird in the country. Throughout the beech forests, high up and low down, in the most gloomy, wet, and impenetrable ...
— A Naturalist's Voyage Round the World - The Voyage Of The Beagle • Charles Darwin
... life! It adds a new touch of interest to the forbidding cactus to know that the cactus wren builds her nest between its leaves. The spines probably serve to protect the bird from her enemies. But are they not also a menace to her and to her young? But this "procreant cradle" of a bird in the arms of the fanged desert growth softens ...
— The Last Harvest • John Burroughs
... Nightingale': "What do you think of me? Do I sing by rote? Or by note? Have I a parrot's echo-throat? Oh no! I caught my strains From Nature's freshest veins. . . . . . "He A match for me! No more than a wren or a chickadee! Mine is the voice of the young and strong, Mine the soul of the brave and free!" This self-appreciation is confirmed by the greatest authority on birds, Audubon: "There is probably no bird in the world that possesses all the musical qualifications of this king of song, who ...
— Select Poems of Sidney Lanier • Sidney Lanier
... to Man's Protection An Opossum Feigning Death Migration of the Golden Plover. (Map) Remarkable Village Nests of the Sociable Weaver Bird Spotted Bower-Bird, at Work on Its Unfinished Bower Hawk-Proof Nest of a Cactus Wren A Peace Conference With an Arizona Rattlesnake Work Elephant Dragging a Hewn Timber The Wrestling Bear, "Christian," and His Partner Adult Bears at Play Primitive Penguins on the Antarctic Continent, Unafraid of Man Richard W. Rock and His Buffalo ...
— The Minds and Manners of Wild Animals • William T. Hornaday
... classical landscape, that 'Poussin' to a French ear conveyed the idea of 'chicken,' or of the young of birds in general. (Is it from 'pousser,' as if they were a kind of budding of bird?) Everybody seems to agree in feeling that this is a kind of wren among the dabchicks. Bewick's name, 'Little Gallinule,' meaning of course, if he knew it, the twice-over little Gallina;—and here again the question occurs to me about its voice. Is it a twice-over little crow, called a 'creak,' or anything like ...
— Love's Meinie - Three Lectures on Greek and English Birds • John Ruskin
... head Sir Christopher Wren must have had, and what a monument to his genius this gigantic pile is. No wonder he wanted this ...
— Around the World with Josiah Allen's Wife • Marietta Holley
... disappearing like a squirrel, and watching all our movements. Though he does not avoid our company, it is with difficulty that a marksman can obtain a good aim at him, so rapidly does he change his position among the leaves and branches. In this habit he resembles the Wren. While we are watching his motions, he pauses in his song, and utters that peculiar note of complaint from which he has derived his name, Chewink, though the sound he utters is more like ...
— The Atlantic Monthly , Volume 2, No. 14, December 1858 • Various
... Mayors and aldermen and burghers and beef-eaters. And somehow Dick Whittington and his cat are mixed up with it all, and exhibitions with glass roofs and careful craftsmen and apprentices, and Christopher Wren. Alas and ...
— Cleo The Magnificent - The Muse of the Real • Louis Zangwill
... the supper of the wren pie, Max bought from a pedler a gray falcon most beautifully marked, with a scarlet head and neck, and we sent our squires to Hymbercourt, asking him to solicit from the duke's seneschal, my Lord de Vergy, permission to strike a heron on the marshes. The favor was easily ...
— Yolanda: Maid of Burgundy • Charles Major
... the infant Christ in the folk-lore of Europe and the East. In Normandy, the wren is called Poulette de Dieu, Oiseau de Dieu, "God's Chicken," "God's Bird,"—corresponding to the old Scotch "Our Lady's Hen,"—because, according to legend, "she was present at the birth of the Infant Saviour, made her nest in his cradle, and brought moss and feathers to form ...
— The Child and Childhood in Folk-Thought • Alexander F. Chamberlain
... piquant, turned-up nose, while Beatrice, whom everybody called "Bee," wore her curly dark hair cut short, had a melancholy brown face entirely unlike her character and was as slender and small and quick in her movements as a tiny wren. ...
— The Camp Fire Girls at Sunrise Hill • Margaret Vandercook
... said to less in size than the wren. The bill is thick; the upper parts of the body brown, and the under parts white. The tail is forked, and each feather is tipped with white. The ...
— Domestic pleasures - or, the happy fire-side • F. B. Vaux
... woman laid the newspaper gently down by her husband's elbow, and looked at him with a certain air of grandeur and strength. The instinct that arouses the mother wren to peck at the schoolboy's hand at her nest was strong in ...
— From One Generation to Another • Henry Seton Merriman
... century following that dreary period, suffering alike from the silence of Cowper and the song of Hayley. You may accept the fact as natural, that Zwingli and Luther, without knowing each other, preached the same reformed gospel; that Newton, and Hooke, and Halley, and Wren arrived independently of each other at the great law of the diminution of gravity with the square of the distance; that Leverrier and Adams felt their hands meeting, as it were, as they stretched them into the outer darkness beyond the orbit of Uranus, in search ...
— Pages From an Old Volume of Life - A Collection Of Essays • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... For many days, while strolling about in quest of bird lore, I heard a quaint little song in the bushy clumps, and that, too, in some of the most out-of-the-way places. "It is nothing but the house wren," I muttered to myself, I know not how often. "It isn't worth while to look for it when there are new birds to be found. Still, it's singular," I continued, "that the house wren should dwell in such secluded places. It would ...
— Our Bird Comrades • Leander S. (Leander Sylvester) Keyser
... but this time the insect engaged my particular attention because it was not alone, being accompanied by a green caterpillar bigger than herself, which she held beneath her body as she travelled along on the window-sill so near my face. "So, so! my little wren-wasp, you have found a satisfactory cranny at last, and have made yourself at home. I have seen you prying about here for a week and wondered where you would take up ...
— My Studio Neighbors • William Hamilton Gibson
... sweet-voiced thrush beareth a golden crown,[63] And even the sparrow boasts a scarlet dress.[64] There partial nature fondles and illumes The plainest offspring that her bosom bears; The golden robin flies on fiery plumes,[65] And the small wren a ...
— Poems • Denis Florence MacCarthy
... kingfishers—the first victim falling to my gun on a day of rain, as it darted across a field to avoid the windings of a brook. I also became a specialist at finding their nests. Birds are so conservative! They are at your mercy, if you care to study their habits. The golden-crested wren builds a nest which is almost invisible; once you have mastered the trick, no gold-crest is safe. I am sorry, now, for all those plundered gold-crests' eggs. And the rarer ones—the grey shrike, that buzzard of the cliff (the most perilous scramble of all my life), the crested titmouse, ...
— Alone • Norman Douglas
... represents him as the medium through which mankind are warned of approaching death. {165} Before the death of a person, a robin is believed, in many instances, to tap thrice at the window of the room in which he or she may be. The wren is also a bird which superstition protects from injury; but it is by no means treated with such reverence as the robin. The praises of both are sung in the ...
— Notes & Queries, No. 41, Saturday, August 10, 1850 • Various
... may, the severe classical style introduced into England by Inigo Jones (who studied in Italy under Palladio), and continued by Sir Christopher Wren, soon swept ...
— Our Homeland Churches and How to Study Them • Sidney Heath
... yonder Hill Where Bill to Beak the Wren and Whip-poor-Will In deed and truth beshrew the Beldam Life Who kisses first ...
— The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam Jr. (The Rubiyt of Omar Khayym Jr.) • Wallace Irwin
... at various times other birds peculiarly of the North. Loons alternately calling and uttering their maniac laughter; purple finches or some of the pine sparrows warbling high and clear; the winter wren, whose rapturous ravings never fail to strike the attention of the dullest passer; all these are exclusively Northern voices, and each expresses some phase or mood of the Silent Places. But none symbolizes as do the three. And when first you hear one of them after ...
— The Forest • Stewart Edward White
... Rogers had married beneath him, and the sight of the pursy upstart—there were people on the Flat who remembered her running barefoot and slatternly—sitting there, in satin and feathers, lording it over his own little Jenny Wren, was more than Mahony could tolerate. The distance was put forward as an excuse for Polly not returning the call, and Polly was docile as usual; though for her part she had thought her visitor quite a pleasant, kindly woman. But then Polly ...
— Australia Felix • Henry Handel Richardson
... verses bear the Burns' stamp, which no one has been successful in counterfeiting: they resemble the verses of Beattie, to which Chambers has compared them, as little as the cry of the eagle resembles the chirp of the wren.] ...
— The Complete Works of Robert Burns: Containing his Poems, Songs, and Correspondence. • Robert Burns and Allan Cunningham
... very ominous, black-looking kopje which stretched down into the valley from the high ground on our left. The guns came into action against this hill at a range of about two thousand yards, and it seemed as if a golden-crested wren could not have escaped if it had been unlucky enough to be there. The shrapnel kept up an almost incessant hail, covering the wooded sides of the kopje with jets of round white balls of smoke, while every now and then the ...
— The Second Battalion Royal Dublin Fusiliers in the South African War - With a Description of the Operations in the Aden Hinterland • Cecil Francis Romer and Arthur Edward Mainwaring
... catch, kill, injure, pursue or have in his possession either dead or alive, or purchase, expose for sale, transport or ship to a port within or without the state a turtle or mourning dove, sparrow, nuthatch, warbler, flicker, vireo, wren, American robin, catbird, tanager, bobolink, blue jay, oriole, grosbeck or redbird, creeper, redstart, waxwing, woodpecker, humming bird, killdeer, swallow, blue bird, blackbird, meadow lark, bunting, ...
— Ohio Arbor Day 1913: Arbor and Bird Day Manual - Issued for the Benefit of the Schools of our State • Various
... the occasion, he seemed tempted to let fall a sapient proverb of anything but a funereal tone. On stepping into the kitchen and seeing the provision that had been made for a repast, he did indeed intimate his intention of assisting at the ceremony in the language of the time-honored wren who cried "I helps" as she let a drop of water fall into the sea. At this moment the clergyman from the chapel-of-ease on the Raise arrived at the Moss, and Matthew prepared to ...
— The Shadow of a Crime - A Cumbrian Romance • Hall Caine
... "White's thrush," close to an outlying belt of forest, and got into a great state of excitement about it. "The only known bird," he said, "which is found in Europe, America, and Australia alike." Then he pointed out the emu wren, a little tiny brown fellow, with long hairy tail-feathers, flitting from bush to bush; and then, leaving ornithology, called their attention to the wonderful variety of low vegetation that they were riding through; Hakeas, Acacias, Grevilleas, and what not. In spring this brown heath would have ...
— The Recollections of Geoffrey Hamlyn • Henry Kingsley
... sing as sweetly as the lark When neither is attended; and I think The nightingale, if she should sing by day When every goose is cackling, would be thought No better a musician than the wren. How many things by reason reasoned are To their ...
— Warlock o' Glenwarlock • George MacDonald
... do not call one greater and one smaller, That which fills its period and place is equal to any. I believe a leaf of grass is no less than the journey-work of the stars. And the pismire is equally perfect, and a grain of sand, and the egg of the wren, And the tree-toad is a 'chef-d'oeuvre' for the highest; And the running blackberry would adorn the parlours of heaven, And the narrowest hinge in my hand puts to scorn all machinery, And the cow-crunching with depressed head surpasses any statue, And a mouse is miracle enough ...
— The Meaning of Good—A Dialogue • G. Lowes Dickinson
... shade Of yonder silent colonnade, Over against the slates that hold Marie in lines of slender gold, A token wrought by fictive fingers, A garland, last year's offering, lingers, Hung out of reach, and facing north. And lo! thereout a wren flies forth, And Gertrude, straining on toetips, Just touches with her prayerful lips The warm home which a bird unskilled In grief and hope knows how ...
— Ionica • William Cory (AKA William Johnson)
... the chosen haunt of the Winter Wren. This is the only place and these the only woods in which I find him in this vicinity. His voice fills these dim aisles, as if aided by some marvellous sounding-board. Indeed, his song is very strong for so small a bird, and unites in a remarkable degree brilliancy and ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17, No. 104, June, 1866 • Various
... called, stood on a hill amid many beautiful trees and foreign shrubs and flowers. Below it ran the quiet Schuylkill, and beyond, above the governor's woods, could be seen far away Dr. Kearsley's fine spire of Christ Church. No better did Master Wren himself ever contrive, or more proportioned to ...
— Hugh Wynne, Free Quaker • S. Weir Mitchell
... bird on the farm that didn't dislike Miss Kitty Cat. And there was only one bird family that didn't live in dread of her. That was the Wren family. And they had a good reason for ...
— The Tale of Miss Kitty Cat - Slumber-Town Tales • Arthur Scott Bailey
... a king: When I do stare, see how the subject quakes. I pardon that man's life. What was thy cause? Adultery? Thou shalt not die: die for adultery! No: The wren goes to 't, and the small gilded fly Does lecher in my sight. Let copulation thrive; ... ... Down from the waist they are Centaurs, Though women all above; But to the girdle do the gods inherit, Beneath is ...
— The Man Shakespeare • Frank Harris
... their earth upon them, twisting high, Breathe fixed tranquillity. The rivulet Sends forth glad sounds, and tripping o'er its bed Of pebbly sands, or leaping down the rocks, Seems, with continuous laughter, to rejoice In its own being. Softly tread the marge, Lest from her midway perch thou scare the wren That dips her bill in water. The cool wind, That stirs the stream in play, shall come to thee. Like one that loves thee nor will let thee pass Ungreeted, and shall ...
— Poetical Works of William Cullen Bryant - Household Edition • William Cullen Bryant
... had heard something of the fabulous tale of the wren sitting upon the eagle's wing, and he had applied it to a linnet. Gibber's familiar style, however, was better than that which Whitehead has assumed. Grand nonsense is insupportable[1180]. Whitehead is but a little man ...
— Life Of Johnson, Vol. 1 • Boswell
... spot. In the autumn, when the leaves, dressed in their gayest dress, were bidding farewell to the sunshine and the wind and each other, hundreds of robin-redbreasts—"God's birds"—hopped like little flames about the ground, and in a hollow tree near the cottage door a pretty red-brown wren and his mate had found shelter for a long time, and reared several broods. As for the saucy, chattering, busy, fearless sparrows, they had feather-lined nests wherever a sparrow's nest could be placed, and that is almost everywhere—on the pump, behind the wood-pile, ...
— Harper's Young People, February 17, 1880 - An Illustrated Weekly • Various
... we'll show them," she purred softly. "We'll see who wins at last, the eagle who soars or the little wren in the hedge close beside the garden wall—we'll see, ...
— The Foolish Virgin • Thomas Dixon
... blue and faint fresh rose; and over them the beautiful fold of her full eyebrow on the eyelid like a bending upper heaven. Those winter mornings are divine. They move on noiselessly. The earth is still, as if awaiting. A wren warbles, and flits through the lank drenched brambles; hill-side opens green; elsewhere is mist, everywhere expectancy. They bear the veiled sun like a sangreal aloft to the wavy marble flooring of ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... come, the saddest of the year, Of wailing winds, and naked woods, and meadows brown and sere. Heaped in the hollows of the grove, the autumn leaves lie dead; They rustle to the eddying gust, and to the rabbit's tread. The robin and the wren are flown, and from the shrubs, the jay, And from the wood-top calls the crow through ...
— The Ontario Readers - Third Book • Ontario Ministry of Education
... our party went to see various other curious places in and near these two great towers. One of these places was called the model room, where there is a very large model of a plan for a church which Sir Christopher Wren, the architect who built St. Paul's, first designed. By most good judges, it is thought to be a better design than the one which was finally adopted. There were, besides this, various other curious models and old relics ...
— Rollo in London • Jacob Abbott
... lay the foundation of fifteen generations of Kami, whose birth seems to have been essential to the "making of the land," though their names afford no clue to the functions discharged by them. From over sea, seated in a gourd and wearing a robe of wren's feathers, there comes a pigmy, Sukuna Hikona, who proves to be one of fifteen hundred children begotten by the Kami of the original trinity. Skilled in the arts of healing sickness and averting calamities from men or animals, this pigmy renders invaluable aid ...
— A History of the Japanese People - From the Earliest Times to the End of the Meiji Era • Frank Brinkley and Dairoku Kikuchi
... so the Renaissance architecture. Raised at once into all the magnificence of which it was capable by Michael Angelo, then taken up by men of real intellect and imagination, such as Scamozzi, Sansovino, Inigo Jones, and Wren, it is impossible to estimate the extent of its influence on the European mind; and that the more, because few persons are concerned with painting, and, of those few, the larger number regard it with slight attention; ...
— Stones of Venice [introductions] • John Ruskin
... Mall, is none here but we two? When didst thou see the starveling schoolmaster? That rat, that shrimp, that spindle-shank, That wren, that sheep-biter, that lean chitty-face, That famine, that lean envy, that all-bones, That bare anatomy, that Jack-a-Lent, That ghost, that shadow, that moon ...
— A Select Collection of Old English Plays, Vol. IX • Various
... company night and day. She loues (and liues in) hots of woods in her hart. She will helpe you to cleanse your trees of caterpillars, and all noysome wormes and flyes. The gentle robin red-breast will helpe her, and in winter in the coldest stormes will keepe a part. Neither will the silly wren be behind in summer, with her distinct whistle (like a sweete recorder) to cheere ...
— On the Portraits of English Authors on Gardening, • Samuel Felton
... was widely read and actively attacked. One opponent of its doctrines was Dr. Henry Ferne, afterward Bishop of Chester. Another was Matthew Wren, eldest son to the Bishop of Ely. He was one of those who met for scientific research at the house of Dr. Wilkins, and had, said Harrington, "an excellent faculty of magnifying a ...
— The Commonwealth of Oceana • James Harrington
... never penetrated, and carrying the electric pulse, charged with the burden of human thought, from continent to continent, from the Old World to the New, is a testimonial to his greatness.... The Latin inscription in the church of St. Paul's in London, referring to Sir Christopher Wren, its architect,—'If you would behold his monument, look around you,'—may be applied in a far more comprehensive sense to our friend, since the great globe itself has become ...
— Samuel F. B. Morse, His Letters and Journals - In Two Volumes, Volume II • Samuel F. B. Morse
... reviving the recollection of its superstitious origin, and exciting deep veneration as the depository of the relics of so much renown. What topics for commentary, if they had not been recently exhausted in the classical stanzas of a Maurice! St. Paul's, the monument of Wren, was but just visible through the haze, though the man at the Telegraph asserted, that he could sometimes tell the hour by its dial without the aid of a telescope! How characteristic is this structure become of the British ...
— A Morning's Walk from London to Kew • Richard Phillips
... church of St. Mary's: a vast edifice, indeed, and almost worthy to be a cathedral. People who pretend to skill in such matters say that it is in a poor style of architecture, though designed (or, at least, extensively restored) by Sir Christopher Wren; but I thought it very striking, with its wide, high, and elaborate windows, its tall towers, its immense length, and (for it was long before I outgrew this Americanism, the love of an old thing merely ...
— Our Old Home - A Series of English Sketches • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... polyglottis, or buffoon-bird, is never found north of 46 deg. N. latitude in the summer. This bird pours forth all sorts of notes in a short space of time, without any apparent order. The thrush, the wren, the jay, and the robin are imitated in as short a time as it takes ...
— Personal Memoirs Of A Residence Of Thirty Years With The Indian Tribes On The American Frontiers • Henry Rowe Schoolcraft
... of birds that are very ready to use the nesting places you make. These are the Robin, Wren, and Phoebe. But each bird wants its own kind exactly right, or will ...
— Woodland Tales • Ernest Seton-Thompson
... Earl of St. Alban's was elected grand master, who appointed Mr. (afterwards Sir Christopher) Wren his deputy; which office he held until 1685, when he was himself appointed to the grand chair. During his deputy-ship he erected many noble buildings, particularly the ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 17, - Issue 491, May 28, 1831 • Various
... street, at all events—of old and new! Here were the Trinity almshouses, with their Jacobean gables and their low, spreading quadrangle behind the fine ironwork that shelters them from the street—a poetic fragment from the days of Wren and Dryden, sore threatened now by an ever-advancing London, hungry for ground and space. Here was a vast mission-hall, there a still vaster brewery; on the right, the quiet entrance to the oldworld quiet of Stepney-Green; and to the left a huge flame-ringed gin-palace, with shops ...
— Sir George Tressady, Vol. II • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... snow to enter. From here another hazard of flight was manifest, for he could see now that the face of the country outside on the level was spread as with a tablecloth, its white surface undisturbed, ready for the impress of so light an object as a hopping wren. To make his way across it would be to drag his bonds behind him, plainly asking the world to pull him back. Obviously there must be a more tactical retreat, and without more ado he followed the river's course, keeping ever, as he could, in the shelter of the younger ...
— Doom Castle • Neil Munro
... for I need it not," retorted Dick. "Doubtless you take joy of your fancies; but realities are good enough for me, at least such realities as these. Look at that bird hovering over yonder flower, for instance; smaller, much smaller, than a wren is he, yet how perfectly shaped and how gloriously plumaged. Look to the colour of him, as rich a purple as that of your sunset cloud, with crest and throat like gold painted green. And then, the long curved beak of him, see how daintily he dips ...
— Two Gallant Sons of Devon - A Tale of the Days of Queen Bess • Harry Collingwood
... died at the age of 90, sitting in his chair after dinner, and was buried in the cathedral which he had erected, with this inscription, "Si monumentum requiris, circumspice" (If you inquire after his monument, look around); Wren was a man of science as well as an artist; he was at one time Savilian professor of Astronomy at Oxford, and one of the founders of the Royal ...
— The Nuttall Encyclopaedia - Being a Concise and Comprehensive Dictionary of General Knowledge • Edited by Rev. James Wood
... fly, An' why can't I? Must we give in," Says he with a grin, "'T the bluebird an' phoebe Are smarter'n we be? Jest fold our hands an' see the swaller, An' blackbird an' catbird beat us holler? Does the leetle, chatterin', sassy wren, No bigger'n my thumb, know more than men? Jest show me that! Er prove 't the bat Has got more brains than's in my hat, An' I'll back ...
— Poems Teachers Ask For • Various
... veery had flown with his heart-break to some distant copse, two song-sparrows came to persuade us with their blithe melody that life was worth living, after all; and cheerful little domestic birds, like the jenny-wren and the chipping-sparrow, pecked about and put in between whiles their little chit-chat across the boughs, while the bobolink called to us like a comrade, and the phoebe-bird gave us a series of imitations, and the scarlet tanager and the wild canary put in a vivid ...
— Vanishing Roads and Other Essays • Richard Le Gallienne
... spring thinness and scantiness by a vivid energy of colour; while straight across the court, beyond the rich patchwork of the roofs and the picturesque outlines of the chimneys, a delicate piece of white stone-work rose into air—the spire of one of Wren's churches, as dainty, as perfect, and as fastidiously balanced as the hand ...
— Miss Bretherton • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... about it. The nuisance of it is, that the brute will go and put the Boers up to everything as to our strength, supplies, ammunition, and goodness knows what else. But, look here, I'm going on now to see how Sam Wren is." ...
— Charge! - A Story of Briton and Boer • George Manville Fenn
... caused a great stir in the par-ty. Some of the birds rushed off at once; one old jay wrapped it-self up with care and said, "I must get home; the night air doesn't suit my throat!" and a wren called out to her brood, "come, my dears! It's high time you were all ...
— Alice in Wonderland - Retold in Words of One Syllable • J.C. Gorham
... Wren's Dome has whispered with man's prayer Have angels leaned to wonder out of Heaven At such uprush of intercession given, Here where to-day one soul two nations share, And with accord send up thro' trembling air ...
— A Treasury of War Poetry - British and American Poems of the World War 1914-1917 • Edited, with Introduction and Notes, by George Herbert Clarke
... took something else off a clothes-horse— "That isn't my pinny?" said Lucie. "Oh no, if you please'm; that's a damask table-cloth belonging to Jenny Wren; look how it's stained with currant wine! It's very bad to ...
— The Tale of Mrs. Tiggy-Winkle • Beatrix Potter
... 120 persons of both nations named as Delinquents—the Marquis of Newcastle, the Earls of Derby and Bristol, Lords Cottington, Digby, Hopton, Colepepper and Jermyn, with Hyde, Secretary Nicholas, and Bishops Wren and Bramhall, in the English list, and the Marquises of Huntly and Montrose, the Earls of Traquair, Nithsdale, Crawford, Carnwath, Forth, and Airlie, Bishop Maxwell, and MacDonald MacColkittoch, in the Scottish list. As bearers of these fell Propositions to the King the Lords appointed ...
— The Life of John Milton Vol. 3 1643-1649 • David Masson
... century behind this age of steam and lightning. To form an adequate idea of the mechanic and fine arts in that "city of the kings," we must transport ourselves to the Saxon period of European civilization. Both the material and the construction of the houses would craze Sir Christopher Wren. With fine quarries close at hand, they must build with mud mixed with stones, or plastered on wattles, like the Druses of Mount Lebanon. Living on the equatorial line and on the meridian so accurately measured by the highest mathematics of France and Spain, Quitonians must needs leave out ...
— The Andes and the Amazon - Across the Continent of South America • James Orton
... the oriole, The linnet and the wren— When shall I see their fairyships, And hear their ...
— Gifts of Genius - A Miscellany of Prose and Poetry by American Authors • Various
... wish I were a Robin, A Robin or a little Wren, everywhere to go; Through forest, field, or garden, And ask no leave or pardon, Till winter comes with icy thumbs To ruffle ...
— Required Poems for Reading and Memorizing - Third and Fourth Grades, Prescribed by State Courses of Study • Anonymous
... smiles on all Hear the wren with sorrows small, Hear the small bird's grief and care, Hear ...
— Poems of William Blake • William Blake
... England produced no very eminent painters or sculptors, though foreign artists, such as Rubens and Van Dyck, were welcomed there. Among architects the most famous was Sir Christopher Wren, who did much to popularize the Renaissance style of building. [31] A great fire which destroyed most of old London during the reign of Charles II gave Wren an opportunity to rebuild about fifty parish churches, as well as ...
— EARLY EUROPEAN HISTORY • HUTTON WEBSTER
... Worcester) was made Rector. The church was rebuilt by Wren in 1686 "in a neat, plain manner." The ancient tower remained, and was recased in 1704. The building is large, light, and airy, and is in the florid, handsome style we are accustomed to associate with Wren. At the west end is a fine late-pointed arch, communicating with the tower, in which ...
— Holborn and Bloomsbury - The Fascination of London • Sir Walter Besant
... man with a beard, Who said, "It is just as I feared!— Two owls and a hen, Four larks and a wren, Have all built their nests ...
— Toaster's Handbook - Jokes, Stories, and Quotations • Peggy Edmund & Harold W. Williams, compilers
... and the naked rabbit; and the chick of the pheasant, and the partridge, has more perfect plumage, and more perfect eyes, as well as greater aptitude to locomotion, than the callow nestlings of the dove, and of the wren. The parents of the former only find it necessary to shew them their food, and to teach them to take it up; whilst those of the latter are obliged for many days to obtrude ...
— Zoonomia, Vol. I - Or, the Laws of Organic Life • Erasmus Darwin
... N. Tolstoi The Nightingale Adapted from Hans Christian Andersen How the Wren Became King Adapted from ...
— Tell Me Another Story - The Book of Story Programs • Carolyn Sherwin Bailey
... morning or when the day's work was over. Hubert passed with a glance of recognition the bramble in which he had found his first spink's nest, the shadowed mossy bank whence had fluttered the hapless wren just when the approach of two prowling youngsters should have bidden her keep close. Boys on the egg-trail are not wont to pay much attention to the features of the country; but Hubert remembered that at a certain meadow-gate he had always ...
— Demos • George Gissing
... higher pleasure than to watch the nest-building of birds. See the Wren looking for a convenient cavity in ivy-covered walls, under eaves, or among the thickly growing branches of fir trees, the tiny creature singing with cheerful voice all day long. Observe the Woodpecker tunneling his nest in the limb of ...
— Birds Illustrated by Color Photography [May, 1897] - A Monthly Serial designed to Promote Knowledge of Bird-Life • Various
... in you to insure the success of his performance. Meanwhile, I go to make the circle of my dance smaller; who knows but to-morrow I may be a snow-bunting on your tall cliffs, or a little homeless wren ...
— The Jessica Letters: An Editor's Romance • Paul Elmer More
... side, ready—for a consideration—to direct our transatlantic ignorance into veritable "paths of pleasantness and peace." Access to the Middle Temple from Fleet Street is had by way of another gate-house, built by Sir Christopher Wren in 1684, soon after the Great Fire. It is in the style of Inigo Jones, of reddish brick, with stone pointing. There are several other entrances,—many of them known only to the initiated,—through intricate courts and passages debouching on Fleet Street and the surrounding thoroughfares, and one ...
— Lippincott's Magazine Of Popular Literature And Science, Old Series, Vol. 36—New Series, Vol. 10, July 1885 • Various
... time was come. He looked at Roderick, who slept wearily on his bed, and it seemed to him as though suddenly a small and shadowy thing, like a bird, leapt from the boy's mouth and on to the bed; it was like a wren, only white, with dusky spots upon it; and the priest held his breath: for now he knew that the soul was out of the body, and that unless it could return uninjured into the limbs of the child, nothing could ...
— Paul the Minstrel and Other Stories - Reprinted from The Hill of Trouble and The Isles of Sunset • Arthur Christopher Benson
... his post, true to the call of prejudice, of power, to the will of others and to his own interest. In the whole of his public career, and with all the goodness of his disposition, he has not shewn "so small a drop of pity as a wren's eye." He seems to be on his guard against every thing liberal and humane as his weak side. Others relax in their obsequiousness either from satiety or disgust, or a hankering after popularity, or a wish to be thought above narrow prejudices. The Chancellor alone is fixed and immoveable. ...
— The Spirit of the Age - Contemporary Portraits • William Hazlitt
... Thomas—nearly as thick-headed, but without thy indifference to danger and carelessness of offence? I tell thee that Austria has in all that mass of flesh no bolder animation than is afforded by the peevishness of a wasp and the courage of a wren. Out upon him! He a leader of chivalry to deeds of glory! Give him a flagon of Rhenish to drink with his ...
— The Talisman • Sir Walter Scott
... where the red-winged blackbird is building her bulky nest between the stems of the cat tail, and the prairie marsh wren is making her second or third little globular nest in a similar place, there is a blaze of yellow from the marsh marigolds which make masses of succulent stems and leaves, crowned with pale gold, as far up the marsh as the eye can reach. In Iowa, it ...
— Some Spring Days in Iowa • Frederick John Lazell
... events of the day was the sight of the winter wren, the first time he had been seen this winter. He was working among the stumps of trees at the brink of the river, under the ice which had been left clinging to the trees when the high water receded. There was no mistaking his beautiful coat of cinnamon brown, his pert manner, ...
— Some Winter Days in Iowa • Frederick John Lazell
... without finding a house where food can be had and lodging; whereas, such is the noble desolation of our magnificent country, that in many a direction for a thousand miles, I will engage a dog shall not find shelter from a snow-storm, nor a wren find ...
— Miscellaneous Essays • Thomas de Quincey
... days are come, the saddest of the year, Of wailing winds, and naked woods, and meadows brown and sere. Heaped in the hollows of the grove, the autumn leaves lie dead; They rustle to the eddying gust, and to the rabbit's tread; The robin and the wren are flown, and from the shrubs the jay, And from the wood-top calls the crow through all ...
— Selections From American Poetry • Various
... future generations must still tower proudly above the common herd in every respect; I want no plaything for a wife, but a woman, such as you yourself were in youth—tall, dignified and handsome. My heart goes forth to no gold-crested wren but to a really royal maiden.—Of what use to waste words! Paula, the noble daughter of a glorious father, is my choice. It came upon me just now like a revelation; I ask your blessing on my union ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... has burst into flames, "Bi not efred, Madam," he says, "thi faiR hes cot jur gaun. Le daun op-on thi floR, end ju uil put aut thi faiR uith jur hendS." His presence of mind saves him from using his own hands for the purpose. Resourcefulness is indeed as natural to him as to Sir CHRISTOPHER WREN in the famous poem. "Uilliam," he says to his man, "if enEbodE asch-s for mi, ju uil se thet ai scel ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 152, April 11, 1917 • Various
... next year he published Observations on Sorbiere's Voyage into England, in a letter to Mr. Wren. This is a work not ill-performed; but, perhaps, rewarded with at least ...
— Lives of the Poets, Vol. 1 • Samuel Johnson
... degree; all the men that ever cut a thistle, drained a puddle out of England, contrived a wise scheme in England, did or said a true and valiant thing in England. I tell thee, they had not a hammer to begin with; and yet Wren built St. Paul's: not an articulated syllable; and yet there have come English Literatures, Elizabethan Literatures, Satanic-School, Cockney-School, and other Literatures;—once more, as in the old time of the Leitourgia, a most waste imbroglio, and world-wide jungle and ...
— Past and Present - Thomas Carlyle's Collected Works, Vol. XIII. • Thomas Carlyle
... architecture came degradation. And then the Renaissance of pagan types, from which the Gothic had derived its being by a rational development, was by the revivalists of those days hotch-potched into a more or less homogeneous mass, which even the genius of Wren could ...
— Bell's Cathedrals: The Cathedral Church of Norwich - A Description of Its Fabric and A Brief History of the Episcopal See • C. H. B. Quennell
... construction. He cannot always adapt his house either to the physical or mental size of his family, but must accept what is possible with much the same feeling with which a family of robins might accommodate themselves to a wren's nest, or an oriole to that of a barn-swallow. But the fact remains, that all these accidental homes must, in some way, be brought into harmony with the lives to be lived in them, and the habits and wants of the family; ...
— Principles of Home Decoration - With Practical Examples • Candace Wheeler
... The golden-crested wren may be taken by striking the bough upon which it is sitting, sharply, with a stone or stick. The timid bird immediately drops to the ground, and generally dead. As their skins are tender, those who want them for stuffing will find this preferable to ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Volume XII. F, No. 325, August 2, 1828. • Various
... A Wren had built its nest on the side of a road. When the eggs were hatched, a Camel passed that way. The little Wrens saw it and said to their father when he returned ...
— The Talking Beasts • Various
... character—the humble, meek, retiring qualities. But it is precisely for these that the Church of Christ finds place. "Blessed are the meek, blessed are the merciful, blessed are they that hunger and thirst after righteousness, blessed are the poor in spirit." In God's world there is a place for the wren and the violet, just as truly as there is for the eagle and the rose. In the Church of God there is a place—and that the noblest—for Dorcas making garments for the poor, and for Mary sitting at the feet ...
— Sermons Preached at Brighton - Third Series • Frederick W. Robertson
... printer of which was John Walter, of Printing House Square, a quiet, little, out-of-the-way nook, nestling under the shadow of St. Paul's, not known to one man in a thousand of the daily wayfarers at the base of Wren's mighty monument, but destined to become as famous and as well known as any spot of ground in historic London. This newspaper boasted but four pages, and was composed by a new process, with types consisting of words and syllables instead of single letters. ...
— Continental Monthly , Vol. 6, No. 1, July, 1864 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy. • Various
... an example at the church of St. Alban, Wood Street, Cheapside. This church was rebuilt by Sir C. Wren, and finished 1685; showing that the hour-glass was in use subsequent to the ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 195, July 23, 1853 • Various
... were pulled down: In this room the fine fifteenth century oaken roof, with its carved ornaments, has been preserved, but at Salisbury the roof is modern, with a plaster ceiling. Lincoln's new library, designed by Wren and erected in 1674, is next to this old room. According to a 1450 catalogue now preserved at Lincoln the library contained one hundred and seven works, more than seventy of which now remain. Among the most important manuscripts are a mid-fifteenth century copy of old English romances of great ...
— Old English Libraries, The Making, Collection, and Use of Books • Ernest A. Savage
... quadrangle familiarly termed "quad," 264 feet by 261, the dimensions originally planned by Wolsey; but the buildings which bound it on three sides were executed after the destruction of the old edifice in the great civil wars from designs by Sir Christopher Wren in 1688. ...
— Rides on Railways • Samuel Sidney
... pyramidal roof and belfry (to serve as a lookout station), has just been built. A stage ahead, architecturally, of the log meeting-house with clay-filled chinks, thatched roof, oiled-paper windows, earthen floor, and a stage behind the charming steeple style made popular by Sir Christopher Wren, and now multiplied in countless graceful examples all over New England, the Old Ship is entirely unconscious of the distinction which is awaiting it—the distinction of being the oldest house for public worship in the United States which still stands on its original ...
— The Old Coast Road - From Boston to Plymouth • Agnes Rothery
... concerning which he was rabid. His liking for birds began with Miss Sally Ruth's pigeons and the friendly birds in our garden. And as he learned to know them his love for them grew. I have seen him daily visit a wren's nest without once alarming the little black-eyed mother. I have heard him give the red-bird's call, and heard that loveliest of all birds answer him. And I have seen the impudent jays, within reach of his hand, ...
— Slippy McGee, Sometimes Known as the Butterfly Man • Marie Conway Oemler
... 'Doesn't matter,' the wren replied; 'birds is everywhere, and always hungry. Wherever you drop crumbs you may be sure they'll be acceptable. Remember that. Now, is there anything I can do ...
— The Flamp, The Ameliorator, and The Schoolboy's Apprentice • E. V. Lucas
... sick of the thing that he'll sell out cheap rather than fight the thing to a finish. Because this can be appealed, and taken up and up, and reopened because of some technical error—oh, as Jenny Wren says in—in—" ...
— Good Indian • B. M. Bower
... manuscript on the table, and also some proofs. They were part of Our Mutual Friend, which was then appearing in monthly numbers; and on that morning a proof of one of the illustrations had arrived from Mr. Marcus Stone. It was the one in which 'Miss Wren fixes her idea.' I was then about sixteen or seventeen, and Dickens said, 'You are setting out in life; mind you always fix your idea.' He asked me what I was going to be, and I said a farmer. He said, 'Better be that than an author or poet;' and after I had had two glasses ...
— A Week's Tramp in Dickens-Land • William R. Hughes
... and now somewhat rare book Talpa; or, The Chronicles of a Clay Farm, by Chandos Wren Hoskins, one of the few agricultural works ever written by a scholar, he refers to his first experience of this sort, when speaking of his difficulty in making up his mind as to whether he should let the property into which he had just come by inheritance, ...
— Grain and Chaff from an English Manor • Arthur H. Savory
... three times in winter in my life. The event of one long walk, recently, in February, was seeing one of these birds. As I followed a byroad, beside a little creek in the edge of a wood, my eye caught a glimpse of a small brown bird darting under a stone bridge. I thought to myself no bird but a wren would take refuge under so small a bridge as that. I stepped down upon it and expected to see the bird dart out at the upper end. As it did not appear, I scrutinized the bank of the little run, covered with logs and brush, a few ...
— The Wit of a Duck and Other Papers • John Burroughs
... altogether mistaken, in fact, were only half wrong when they coupled my name with that of pretty Lucy Plonelle. She had captivated my heart, just as a bird-catcher on a frosty morning catches an imprudent wren on a limed twig, and she might have done ...
— The Works of Guy de Maupassant, Volume II (of 8) • Guy de Maupassant
... identified, it may be, by a missing feather in his tail, that heads the foray on our strawberries and cherries. We recognize afar off either of the pair of "flickers," or yellow-shafted woodpeckers, which have set up their penates in the heart of the left-hand garden gatepost. The wren whose modest tabernacle occupies the top of the porch pilaster we have little difficulty in "spotting" when we meet her in a joint stroll along the lawn-fence. Her ways are not as the ways of other wrens. She has a somewhat different style of diving ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, October, 1877, Vol. XX. No. 118 • Various
... impressively on the notes "Take two cows, Taffy; Taffy take TWO!" and then dashing out, flapping and grey, in their faces, rather to Barbara's alarm, and then by Armine's stumbling on his first bird's nest, a wren's in the moss of an old stump, where the tiny bird unadvisedly flew out of her leafy hole full before their eyes. That was a marvel of marvels, a delight equal to that felt by any explorer the world has seen. Armine and Barbara, who lived in one perpetual fairy ...
— Magnum Bonum • Charlotte M. Yonge
... the bogle wags, a thing of jest And open scorn; the very pipits mock it; A jenny wren, I'm told, has built her nest In one ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 146, June 3, 1914 • Various
... the infinity of stairs, and entered the crypt, as it is called, under the church. There were many grand tombs there. Nelson's occupies the centre, and is a fine work. But what impressed me most was the tomb of Sir Christopher Wren himself; a simple tablet marks his tomb, with this inscription, which is repeated above ...
— Travellers' Tales • Eliza Lee Follen
... Warbler's song is entirely unlike that of any other Warbler, and is a loud, clearly whistled performance of five, six, or seven notes, turdle, turdle, turdle, resembling in tone some of the calls of the Carolina Wren. He is so persistent in his singing, however, that the Red-Breasted Merganser's simple croak would sometimes ...
— Birds Illustrated by Color Photography [August, 1897] - A Monthly Serial designed to Promote Knowledge of Bird-Life • Various
... country called a willow-wren (Motacilla) runs up the stem of the crown-imperial (Frittillaria coronalis) and sips the pendulous drops within its petals. This species of Motacilla is called by Ray Regulus non cristatus. ...
— The Botanic Garden - A Poem in Two Parts. Part 1: The Economy of Vegetation • Erasmus Darwin
... The fluted wren is sobbing Beneath the mossy eaves; The throstle's chord is throbbing In coronal of leaves; The home of love is lilies, And rose-hearts, flaming red, Red roses and white lilies— Lo, thus the ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... kind of man—out of the region of romance, fantastical notions, enrapturing imagery, nicely coloured imagination, clever lying and cleverer deception, beautiful green fields, clear running rivulets, the singing of the wood songster, bullfinch, and wren, in the midst of woodbine, sweetbriar, and roses—with an eye to observe, a heart to feel, and a hand ready to help, I am led to contemplate, aye, and to find out if possible, the remedy, though my friends say it is ...
— Gipsy Life - being an account of our Gipsies and their children • George Smith
... a spotty-eyed cat going stealthily under the comb of the hedge, with her stomach wired in, and her spinal column fluted, to look like a wrinkled blackthorn snag. But still worse is it for that poor thrush, or lintie, or robin, or warbler-wren, if he flutters in his bosom when he spies that cat, and sets up his feathers, and begins to hop about, making a sad little chirp to his mate, and appealing to the sky to protect ...
— Springhaven - A Tale of the Great War • R. D. Blackmore
... briefly to tell me whether you believe that the plainer head and less bright colours of a female chaffinch, the less red on the head and less clean colours of the female goldfinch, the much less red on the breast of the female bull-finch, the paler crest of golden-crested wren, etc., have been acquired by them for protection. I cannot think so any more than I can that the considerable differences between female and male house sparrow, or much greater brightness of the male Parus coeruleus (both of which build under cover) than of the female ...
— The Life and Letters of Charles Darwin, Volume II • Francis Darwin
... moulting, these birds produce peculiar trilling notes, identical with those with which in April the cock bird salutes his mate, and they may also be seen in the remarkable fluttering flight characteristic of many birds in the pairing season. The grey wood wren begins to sing before the first moulting, but sings more powerfully during and after moulting, right on into the month of October, singing like a full-grown bird. At the same time this bird twists the body from side to side, and moves the tail to and fro; it ...
— The Sexual Life of the Child • Albert Moll
... Margaret churchyard. Her husband returned to sea. I did invite her to go to dinner with me and my wife to-day. After all this to my Lord, who lay a-bed till eleven o'clock, it being almost five before he went to bed, they supped so late last night with the King. This morning I saw poor Bishop Wren ...
— Diary of Samuel Pepys, Complete • Samuel Pepys
... definitely launched by the appointment of the following committees: Finance, Mrs. J. A. Fouilhoux, Mrs. Elliott Corbet, Dr. Florence Manion; literature, Mrs. Louise Trullinger, Mrs. A. E. Clark, Miss Emma Wold, Miss Blanche Wren; ways and means, Dr. Florence Brown Cassiday, Mrs. Caroline Hepburn, Mrs. C. ...
— The History of Woman Suffrage, Volume VI • Various
... two and two made four, I felt that five times two were ten, But, as for all profounder lore, The robin redbreast or the wren, The sparrow, whether cock or hen, Knew quite as much about Quadratics, Was less confused by x and n, The deep ...
— The Scarlet Gown - being verses by a St. Andrews Man • R. F. Murray
... it hurt him to kill any living creature. But all the young men in the parish went slaughtering birds on St. Stephen's Day; and the Parson allowed there was warrant for it, because, when St. Stephen had almost escaped from prison, a small bird (by tradition a wren) had chirped, and awakened ...
— News from the Duchy • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... which were not burned down in that great calamity. These are St. Helen and St. Ethelburga; St. Katherine Cree, the last expiring effort of Gothic, consecrated by Archbishop Laud; All Hallows, Barking, and St. Giles. Most of the existing City churches were built by Wren, as you know. I think I have seen them nearly all, and in every one, however externally unpromising, I have found something curious, Interesting, and unexpected—some wealth of wood-carving, some relic of the past snatched from the names, some monument, ...
— As We Are and As We May Be • Sir Walter Besant
... first, 'Guadgee,' then 'Bootha,' as it came again, and a third time 'Hippitha.' To my uneducated ear the note seemed the same each time. I asked Bootha what it was. She told me it was the note of a little bird, something like a wren, called Durrooee, in whose shape the spirits of dead women revisited the earth. It seems that Numbardee, the first woman, was, like Milton's Eve, a caterer; she acquired art in beating the roots of plants into flat cakes much esteemed; she was never to be met without ...
— The Euahlayi Tribe - A Study of Aboriginal Life in Australia • K. Langloh Parker
... since I wed with her, and well pleased I am to be back in my own place. I give you word my teeth are rusting with the want of meat. On the journey I got no fair play. She wouldn't be willing to see me nourish myself, unless maybe with the marrow bone of a wren. ...
— Three Wonder Plays • Lady I. A. Gregory
... Martyrs was erected not long ago upon that part of the Moor we have described. Originally the promoters of the church treated for a plot of land about 20 yards above the present site; but the negotiations were broken off, and afterwards they bought Wren Cottage and a stable adjoining, situated about a quarter of a mile northwards. The house was made available for the priest; the stable was converted into a church; and mass was said in it for the first time on Christmas morning, 1864. On the 21st of January, 1865, it was ...
— Our Churches and Chapels • Atticus
... shone. The yellow vetchling had climbed up from the ditch and opened its flower, and there were young nuts on the hazel bough. Far away in a copse a wood-pigeon called; nearer the blackbirds were whistling; a willow wren uttered his note high in the elm, and a distant yellowhammer sang to the ...
— Round About a Great Estate • Richard Jefferies
... desired when one may, when he dines or designs, touch elbows with such choice spirits as Ictinus, Michael Angelo, Vitruvius, Vignola, Piranesi, San Gallo, Bramante, Christopher Wren, Inigo Jones, Charles Bulfinch, Viollet le Duc, Gamier Freres (N.B.—There is only one of him), ...
— The Brochure Series of Architectural Illustration, Volume 01, No. 08, August 1895 - Fragments of Greek Detail • Various
... were no mean antagonists. Then, too, the one with the cudgel wielded it skillfully. Time and again Jimsy avoided a heavy blow which, if successful, must have injured him seriously. The girls, screaming, rushed off, carrying "the Wren," as the woman called her, with them. They dashed at top speed back to the spot where the aeroplanes had been ...
— The Girl Aviators' Motor Butterfly • Margaret Burnham
... their nests where they will be screened from observation and safe from injury; but at times they appear to be utterly reckless, and build in some place where there seems to us to be every probability that the nests will be disturbed. The little wren, for instance, usually builds its nest in some hole in an ivy-covered tree or in a thatch. When it builds in a more open place, it is careful to cover its nest with a dome or roof, leaving a hole in the side for its own passage in and out. It covers its nest on the outer side with green ...
— Chatterbox, 1906 • Various
... Christopher Wren's intellect wrought out the plan for St. Paul's Cathedral. But all impotent to realize themselves, these plans, lying in the King's council chamber grew yellow with age and thick with dust. One day a great ...
— The Investment of Influence - A Study of Social Sympathy and Service • Newell Dwight Hillis
... Over the fresh hearts and understandings of the young, notwithstanding his obscurities, his metaphysics, his contempt of gewgaws, he had established an extraordinary sway. We ourselves, with some thousands of other spectators, saw him receive in that noble structure of Wren, the theatre of Oxford, the decoration of D.C.L., which we perceive he always wears on his title-page. Among his colleagues in the honour were Sir De Lacy Evans and Sir John Burgoyne, fresh from the stirring ...
— Famous Reviews • Editor: R. Brimley Johnson
... great bell of Osney abbey, by whose deep note at the hour of nine in the evening the students are summoned to their respective colleges. The upper part of the tower displays in the bracketed canopies and carved enrichments the skilful hand of Sir Christopher Wren, whose fame was much enhanced by the erection of the gorgeous turrets which project on each side of the gateway.{1} Not caring to endure a closer attack of the togati, who had now approached me, I crossed and entered the great quadrangle, or, according ...
— The English Spy • Bernard Blackmantle
... good Saint Hugh of Lincoln Was a boy in Avalon, He knew the birds and their houses And loved them every one, Merle and mavis and grosbeak, Gay goshawk, and even the wren,— When he took Saint Benedict's service It wasn't the least different then! "They taught me to sing to my Lord," quo' he, "And to dig for my food i' the mould And whithersoever my wits might flee, To come in out o' ...
— Masters of the Guild • L. Lamprey
... standing over the Christian world, the Churches of the Dove and the Churches of the Eagle. There are, moreover, the Churches which do not belong to the Holy Spirit at all, but which are built to pure fancy and logic; such as the Wren Churches ...
— Twilight in Italy • D.H. Lawrence
... intent hereof was to prevent witch-craft [to keep the fairies out]; for lest witches should draw or prick their names therein, and veneficiously mischief their persons, they broke the shell, as Dalecampius hath observed." This is what Sir Thomas Browne tells us about eggshells. And Dr. Wren adds, "Least they [the witches] perchance might use them for boates to sayle in by night." But I, who have no fear of witches, would not break them,—rather use them, try what an untold variety of forms we may make out of this ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 5, No. 32, June, 1860 • Various
... brown house cuddling like a wren's nest on the edge of the longest and deepest of the tide-water coves that cut through Riverton had but four rooms in all,—the kitchen tacked to the back porch, after the fashion of South Carolina kitchens, the shed room in which Peter slept, the dining-room which was the general ...
— The Purple Heights • Marie Conway Oemler |
